Joshua — Complete eBook

God Himself had bestowed upon him ring in his ears
and at the same moment the flames of hate and vengeance
on all Egyptians, which had been fanned anew by the
fortress commander’s base conduct, blazed up
still more brightly. His whole nature was in
the most violent tumult and as the captain noted his
flushed cheeks and the gloomy light in his eyes he
thought that this strong man, too, had been seized
by the fever to which so many convicts fell victims
on the march.

When, at the approach of darkness, the wretched band
sought a night’s rest in the midst of the wilderness,
a terrible conflict of emotions was seething in Joshua’s
soul, and the scene around him fitly harmonized with
his mood; for black clouds had again risen in the north
from the sea and, before the thunder and lightning
burst forth and the rain poured in torrents, howling,
whistling winds swept masses of scorching sand upon
the recumbent prisoners.

After these dense clouds had been their coverlet,
pools and ponds were their beds. The guards had
bound them together hand and foot and, dripping and
shivering, held the ends of the ropes in their hands;
for the night was as black as the embers of their
fire which the rain had extinguished, and who could
have pursued a fugitive through such darkness and
tempest.

But Joshua had no thought of secret flight. While
the Egyptians were trembling and moaning, when they
fancied they heard the wrathful voice of Seth, and
the blinding sheets of fire flamed from the clouds,
he only felt the approach of the angry God, whose
fury he shared, whose hatred was also his own.
He felt himself a witness of His all-destroying omnipotence,
and his breast swelled more proudly as he told himself
that he was summoned to wield the sword in the service
of this Mightiest of the Mighty.

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A school where people
learned modesty
But what do you men
care for the suffering you inflict on others
Childhood already lies
behind me, and youth will soon follow
Good advice is more
frequently unheeded than followed
Precepts and lessons
which only a mother can give
Should I be a man, if
I forgot vengeance?
To the mines meant to
be doomed to a slow, torturing death
What had formerly afforded
me pleasure now seemed shallow

JOSHUA

By Georg Ebers

Volume 4.

CHAPTER XX.

The storm which had risen as night closed in swept
over the isthmus. The waves in its lakes dashed
high, and the Red Sea, which thrust a bay shaped like
the horn of a snail into it from the south, was lashed
to the wildest fury.

Farther northward, where Pharaoh’s army, protected
by the Migdol of the South, the strongest fort of
the Etham line, had encamped a short time before,
the sand lashed by the storm whirled through the air
and, in the quarter occupied by the king and his great
officials, hammers were constantly busy driving the
tent-pins deeper into the earth; for the brocades,
cloths, and linen materials which formed the portable
houses of Pharaoh and his court, struck by the gale,
threatened to break from the poles by which they were
supported.